Samsung 470 host writes question or How to interpret SMART data

So, I've got 2 Samsung 470 256GB SSDs, both installed in Elitebook 8530 laptops as primary drives, that I bought half a year ago and I'm trying to see just how much I've written to them. The problem is that different programs report different values:

Samsung Magician reports 2,942,323,754 writes and 3,931,062,396 reads - in "Total LBAs written", which I don't know how to convert to actual GBs.
I am assuming that Magician thinks I've written 2.94TB and read 3.93TB, that seems pretty accurate (second drive reports 2.15TB and 3.78TB - I'd say also accurate).

Now, Intel Toolbox shows some 87 PB written and 120 PB read - which makes no sense unless I've got TWO used, magical and immortal SSDs (second drive reports 64PB and 100PB).

HD Tune reports -1,349,089,502 lifetime writes from host and -250,663,500 (and yes, they're negative numbers) life time reads from host. Second drive shows -2,141,632,807 and -403,792,248, which is impossible (the first drive has been used longer).

And finally Crystalmark (which I installed first and trusted the most) says I've got 1.89TB total host reads and 1.37TB total writes - all peachy, EXCEPT the numbers reset randomly to ~700GB-1TB. I've noticed it twice, then read/wrote around 300GB (copied a virtual machine several times on the same drive) on each drive until the numbers reset AGAIN. Needless to say, I can't trust it anymore.

I think it's some incompatibility with these particular HP laptops - I've also had a third identical Samsung 470 fail completely (not discoverable by BIOS, failed while laptop was in sleep mode in my backpack for two weeks and the battery ran out), but I've also had several BSODs (GPU related on the first machine and overclock related on the second) when I had to force shut down the laptops and the SSDs work perfectly fine (I know Intels and OCZs fail on unexpected BSODs or in sleep mode).

Anyone has similar problems, and should I just trust Samsung Magician with the write/read numbers? Also, how exactly does "Total LBAs written/read" translate to real GBs - is the number simply the actual data in KB as I think?

I'd appreciate any input,
Thanks!

 

I've just checked my brothers 470 256gb it shows different values in every application in my 8530p - but crystal mark and various versions of samsung magician report the same values for total host writes in his desktop (p55 chipset)

 

I think the LBA block size might be 4KB but not 100% sure if I am remembering correctly. If you calculate it as 4KB, does it seem to add up to the reported GB value? I think 2,942,323,754 writes might be about 11.2-11.5 terabytes?

 

@darkydark Thanks for the input! So it can definitely be some weird incompatibility with this laptop (it never came with an SSD as far as I know).

@namaiki 11 TB seems a bit high, especially for my second laptop - I've only used the SSDs for less than 6 months. But I really don't know whether the 470 uses 4K or 512byte sectors, can't find accurate information anywhere...

 

Haha, I guess if you use 512 byte sectors/blocks it would be a more reasonable ~1.5TB.

It would seem to be 512bytes if you go by this thing that Samsung has: http://www.samsung.com/us/business/oem-solutions/pdfs/SSD-Sales-Presentation.pdf

 

Intel toolbox on my Intel 520 shows 332GB Host writes and 332GB Host LBA's written. I wouldn't use the Intel Toolbox for a Sammy. Can you show a snapshot of the Magician Smart details?

 

SSD SMART screenshot

I also don't see why it would be using reserved space... Anyway, I have left 40GB unpartitioned (over-provisioning) and do weekly backups of the whole SSD so I'm not overly concerned about it - it would be bad if it suddenly failed though

 

Jotm, try HD Sentinel. You can download and use for trial period, but it will give you a lot of info and interprets SMART info. It matches my Intel Toolbox info also. Here is a ss of mine.

 

Just tried it - it shows "30" for Total LBAs Written (I'm guessing that's how Samsung SSDs define it)...

Peculiar problem, but since the SSDs are new and haven't failed yet after pretty extensive use and testing, it should be fine - 3TB in ~5months, I'd say they will last about 10 years (a very conservative estimate), which is actually pretty impressive .

 

That is Samsung Magician, try this, HD Sentinel. Hard Disk Sentinel Professional - HDD health and temperature monitoring, backup

 

To convert Samsung SMART "Total LBAs written" to useful data, you need to:
1.To get total amount of written data in bytes= ("Total LBAs written") * 512
Thats because size of every block is 512 bytes.
2.To get that data in GBytes, you need to: ( ( (Amount of written data in bytes[we`ve got it in step 1]) / 1024) / 1024) / 1024
3. If you want to know it in TBytes: (Amount of written data in GBytes[we`ve got it in step 2]) / 1024

So your
2,942,323,754 writes =

1506469762048 bytes
or
1471161877 KB
or
1436681,52 MB
or
1403 GB
or
1,37 TB

And your other drive:

3,931,062,396 writes =

2012703945216 bytes or 1.83 TB